Giving away a browser and a media player is not the problem. It is using monopoly power to promote your product over the opposition. MS has a monopoly with Windows. I don't think anyone will argue this and none of the regulatory bodies have tried to take action against this. However, they have made it a practice to tie other products such as Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player to Windows. That is illegal all by itself, but MS goes further. They use their position to promote proprietary file formats only supported by their products. Take a look at what they did with Java, or with all the IE-specific DHTMLs and JavaScript variants. For the media player, it is even more obvious with their streaming file format.
[As a side note, one of my favorite examples of how using one MS product can force you into using another is MS Exchange. Obviously you have to use Outlook as a client for this (this is not too bad). Exchange can also be a web mail server allowing access through a browser. However, that browser has to be Internet Explorer -- at least if you want to be able to hit the "reply" button on a message. For that matter, try accessing the Windows Update web page without using IE...]
The best part of it all is that MS is quick to admit that they plan to continue these kind of actions. In a month or so they will release an "update" for Windows that includes a firewall product that is strikingly similar to Zone Alarm and anti-virus software that is very similar to Norton Anti-Virus. Does anyone think that their virus definitions will be compatible with other anti-virus software? Does anyone think that their new firewall will allow users to run Zone Alarm at the same time?
You are probably right that graduating from U of XYZ vs. graduating from ABC State won't influence one's starting salaries. However, there are several prestigous colleges out there that, right or wrong, will have exactly that effect. It's not that a given manager has found that people from Prestigous College are better programmers in their experience, it is the perceived greater compettition for these graduates and the greater confidence in the colleges that produced them. I'm not sure that Ivy League schools have the greatest such effect in technical fields, but certainly the nation's two great science schools, Caltech and M.I.T. have that effect. As someone who has done his share of hiring, I would also say that Stanford and Georgia Tech fall into that category, as well as schools like Duke, Harvey Mudd, and Carnegie Mellon.
It's very interesting to think about who these Niagara based servers are going to be targeted for. The nifty IOE feature and integrated ethernet controller seems to guarantee they should be great for telecom purposes. Of course that's a cursed market that Sun is already king of. Niagara based server seem destined to go head-to-head with dual-processor Xeons and Opterons. IT groups building web server farms or clustered databases will have a new option to consider. Either go with cheaper, lower performance Xeons and Opterons running Linux or with fewer, but more expensive Sun Niagaras running Solaris. It's an interesting proposition, and seems like Sun's first real attempt to compete on price/performance. The real x-factor is AMD. If they can really break into the server market, then the Opteron could offer as much performance as the Niagara but at the same (or lower) price as a Xeon.
It's ironic to see how positions have changed. Intel and AMD are developing multi-core CPUs for use in 4+ way systems, while Sun develops a CPU that is SMP incompatible. Of course Sun is also working on Rock, and hoping it can compete with a Xeon as a single cpu, while still scaling for 100 CPU Infernos (or whatever they are going to call them.)
Hey news flash, there is no DirectX on a Mac, it is a Microsoft technology. On a Mac, it's all about OpenGL. Nvidia has generally fared better at OpenGL than ATI, even though ATI's 9500/9700/9800 is generally considered superior than Nvidia's FX line.
Windows XP development must have been like going to the grocery store hungry with dad's credit card. There must have been such joy that they were eliminating a crappy codebase (Win 95/98/ME) that all kinds of junk got thrown in. It's all the junk that has made XP even more of security disgrace than the 95 codebase. Granted it also inherited problems from Win 2K, but if they hadn't opened up extra ports or gone for "even more" os/app integration, then they wouldn't have looked so bad. Add in bad ideas from the browser wars (all those IE/Outlook Express vulnerabilities) and you get a big mess.
That being said, Microsoft could take a look at other OSes to see how they regularly improve themselves. Linux and OS X have both had major releases in the last year that significantly improved overall performance on both new and (at least in OS X) older machines. Linux has improved its thread model and scheduler. OS X has decreased its memory footprint, used Open GL to offload UI processing, and improved the threading behind the Finder. Both OSes have improved their ability to interact with other OSes. Apple has also added innovations like Expose and Rendezvous.
Workstations have not been Sun's core business for about ten years now. Intel based machines were already cutting into that market by the mid 90's (look at what happened to SGI at that time.) They switched to servers, particularly high end ones, and made loads more money. Faster and even cheaper Intel processors, Linux, and clustering plus the IT recession are killing this market, too.
The workstation market is a niche market with high margins, well suited to Apple. It is not a very significant market, though. Sun gave up on it a long time ago.
RTFA! Schwartz wants Sun to become a software company and thus make money off software, not hardware. Thus he wants to sell his software on commodity hardware running a free OS, but a not-quite free office suite (Star Office.)
Titles are generally overrated, but there is a difference between an "application developer", "software engineer", and "computer scientist." If nothing else, they can be differentiated by how easily they are replaced by somebody in India...
You talk about people who don't know shit about databases, but you know so much that you had to post anonymously. You clearly don't know shit about MySQL.
You're right that MySQL doesn't have all the features that Oracle and DB2 have, but those two databases don't have all the features that MySQL has. MySQL let's you tailor your databases/table types to what they are going to be used for. You can pick and even change on the fly the algorithm used for your tables. This let's you optimize tables that are read only or non-transactional for speed. Run your tables as MyISAM or HEAP if you have enough RAM, and the speed will blow away Oracle or IBM. If you need transactionality, then go with InnoDB tables.
You also show your ignorance by putting Microsoft in the same sentence as Oracle. If you were building a true enterprise system, MS would not even enter the equation. DB2 would be the only other option to consider besides Oracle. You bitch about MySQL and "Each point release massively changes features." Look at MS. Why do you think they are slipping so badly on the next release of SQL Server? Just take a look at their list of new features they are promising and then talk about "massive changes." This is also not surprising since this will be the first release where they've really added anything over what they got from Sybase.
Java is owned -- lock, stock, and barrel -- by Sun. If I want to install a Java runtime and Java development tools on my FreeBSD box, I have to jump through a bunch of different hoops, and click through on a lot of 20-page licensing agreements
The spec is owned. You are free to install any implementation of the spec that you like, from Sun or whoever.
Unlike Perl and Python, the available implementations of Java are not of high quality. Sun's implementations are bloated and slow. Sun put out AWT and then admitted that they goofed and needed to replace it with something completely different. Meanwhile the Perl and Python have gotten everything right the first time.
Umm, where have you been for the past four years? How can you even bring up AWT? It is not even close to relevant in evaluating modern Java. It's funny Java's not fast enough for Linux desktops, but it is fast enough for the most demandng enterprise systems. Try running any spec test on Linux with BEA's JVM vs. Perl or Python.
99% of these lawsuits that people file against doctors that supposedly caused 'brain damage' to children when they were born are completly bogus.
I don't know what's worse here, the 99% or the "completely bogus." What a ridiculous generalization, clearly showing your complete lack of knowledge on the subject.
The really sad part is the doctor lost the lawsuit and is now repsonsible for paying millions of dollars of damages to the family.
You're absolutely correct that the biggest reason people choose to buy their music instead of getting via p2p is for moral/legal reasons, not because of its "consumer" benefit. There are some convenience reasons too, at least for iTunes.
It is far easier to search for something on iTunes, especially non-Top 40 music.
The downloads are almost always faster, sometimes dramatically so, especially for non-Top 40 stuff where you are probably only downloading from one person.
It is more secure. You are not opening up your computer to some virus/worm that is p2p aware.
Quality controls. Ok so maybe you're not satisfied with 128 kbs AAC. I won't get into the debate about the quality of such files. However, at least you're not going to get a messed up rip, or a partial song, or a song that claims to be 320 kbps stereo but turns out to be 64 kpbs mono. You're not going to get Madonna cursing you out either.
Combining the two points above, you don't have to worry about downloading something with a virus.
Download albums. If you want to download all of The Shins album, you don't have to go and search for them song by song. Buying a whole album is trivial on iTunes, just as easy as downloading a single song.
This why good search engines from Yahoo and (hopefully) MSN are important. Google has a Microsoft like stranglehold on searches. So if you want to fool people, you only have to figure out Google. It's a search monoculture, and as such it will be exploited just like an open port on Windows. If there are competing search engines using significantly different algorithms, then it's a lot more difficult to spoof all these engine and search results on all three, including Google, will improve.
The benefit to Sun of GPL'ing their Java implementation would be expansion of their market influence. Right now, there aren't very many open source Java apps (comparitively speaking). This would change rapidly if a complete JVM/JDK could be included legally with every Linux/BSD distribution. Complete adoption of Java by the Open Source community would mean a sharp rise in the popularity of the language and this would help Sun tremendously.
How would including a JVM with every Linux distro help Sun? Do you reall think there are people who say "let's not do this open source project in Java because its not included with XYZLinux 9.3." Java has had a huge following on enterprise Linux servers. When Microsoft was trying to attack Linux,
one of their "studies" was on TCO of a.NET/Windows stack vs. J2EE/Linux. They picked J2EE/Linux becuase it's such a popular combination. Look at some of the optimized JDKs built for Linux such as Blackdown and
JRockit. So are you referring to desktop Linux? That's such a small marketshare, and again it's not like most Linux desktop users don't know where to get a JVM. So it's hard to see how there would be JVMs on Linux machines that currently do not have JVMs. If it had no change on the number of Linux users who have a JVM, then how would it make Linux open source software developers more likely to write things in Java?
Get real. Nobody pirates software (or other media for that matter) because they are trying to make a statement against company/group XYZ -- they do it because they are greedy. Anything else is an absolute lie, it's somebody with a guilty conscience trying to justify their criminal activity. Try to feel noble. You can claim that you're sticking it to Microsoft, but you know that's not the truth.
I wish I could give an x86 notebook to G4 Powerbook comparison, but I have never owned a Powerbook. I have owned several x86 machines, an iBook and a couple of PowerMacs, including my current 1.8 GHz G5 that I have had since October. I have been a Java developer since the late 90's, so maybe some of my experiences will be useful.
In 2000-2001, I had three machines I did most of my work on. My work machine was a Dell desktop (P3/933, 256 MB, 7200 RPM 30 GB drive, Win2K.) My home machine was a desktop I built myself (P4/1.7, 256 MB, 2x7200 RPM 20 GB drives, Win2K upgraded to XP, plus Red Hat 7.x) Finally, I also had (still have!) an iBook (G3 500 MHz, 256 MB RAM, 10 GB drive, always current OSX.) At the time, the application I was working had a lot of very simple Java code (~1600 classes) and a lot of JSPs. My work machine (P3) was faster than my home machine (P4), which was very disappointing, and my iBook was not even close to being able to keep up with either. Eventually I had a big upgrade on my home machine to a 2.4B chip with supporting mobo and 512 MB of DDR RAM. It then easily smoked the old machines.
From 2002-present I've had three other machines that I've done a lot of work on, plus my upgraded home machine. I have an x86 laptop (P4 1.7, 256 MB RAM, 5400 RPM 30 GB drive, Win XP Pro), a new workstation at work (Xeon 1.8 with HyperThreading, 1 GB of RAM, 7200 RPM 80 GB hard drive, Win XP Pro), and a G5 (1.8 GHZ, 512 MB DDR RAM, 160 GB drive, OS 10.3) at home. The app I worked on most of last year was medium size (~400 classes) but much more complex code. I found that it was slower to compile than the old app (I've run both on my upgraded home machine.) I would give my home machine still a slight edge over my Xeon workstation, though it is close. What's interesting, is that I've also compiled things on a P2 400 running Red Hat 9, and while it is slower, it's not by as much as one might expect. I've also used a co-workers laptop that had an AMD XP 2000 chip in it, and it was much faster than my P4 laptop. In general, AMD chips are better at compiling code, because compilation is so branch heavy.
So what about the G5? Out of the box with JDK 1.4.1, I would say that it was comparable to my home computer and my Xeon workstation. However, on most of my machines I use Jikes, as it is generally a much faster compiler. I compiled my own version of Jikes to run on the G5, with a little bit of 64-bit tweaking. It is easily faster than any of my other machines now. So if there was a G5 laptop out there, I would recommend that. Of course there's not, so I would at least say that for Java dev, go AMD over Intel if you decide to go x86.
I have had just the oppposite experiences. I have a P4 running XP Pro, a G5 and an iBook running Panther. Everything is on a wireless network using a Lynksis wireless router. I had a much easier time getting the Macs on the network (XP had issues with using a firewall and the Belkin wireless PCI card I bought for it at the same time.) I have a DeskJet connected to my P4 and I can print to it just fine from both of my Macs. I did have to look this up on Apple's website, because I had to change a setting on my P4. It is very easy to mount shares from my P4 to either Mac, though my P4 does not alwaays "find" the Macs on the first try. I run iTunes on all machines and can stream between them easily.
So maybe I could see you guys having problems with the printer, but that's just because of the default settings on Windows. Maybe it took hours if you didn't go to Apple's support site and search for it there. Panther and Jaguar are both great for dealing with Windows networks, so maybe you were 10.1 or 9.x ?
This is not how it works for me. I have two Macs (a G5 and an iBook) both running Panther and thus iChatAV. One has a camera, the other is a laptop with a built-in microphone but no camera. I can do audio between the two, but cannot do one-way video.
What I am hoping for is that it will allow one-way video, i.e. iChat user has camera, AIM user does not but gets to see video from iChat user anyways. It does not work this way right now for iChat-to-iChat usage, i.e. if only one of two iChat users has a camera, then no video or audio functions are allowed. However, the iChat menus have options for one-way video or audio, which has fostered my hope that this will be available one day.
If you're a cash-strapped startup company, obviously the deferred compensation of stock options is a great way to pay employees and save on expenses. Hopefully that is self-evident. Options are also a great way to insure loyalty, since they vest over time and it gives your employees a stake in the company's fortunes. They could also have a high future value, i.e. it gets your employee to take a risk on the company. This also mitigates risk for the employer, i.e. if the company does poorly, then the employer is out very little money. All of these things are true for struggling startups or established monopolies.
An important think to remember for Google, is that they were a startup very recently. Thus they paid a lot of people in options (for reasons outlined above.) They are now very succesful, but if they want to retain people who have been there for 4+ years, who were give lots of options over the years, they must heavily compensate them for the perceived opportunity cost of those options. If they don't then they risk losing valuable employees who reason "I'm not wasting another five years here for nothing." They could definitely compensate people with cash, but to issue an IPO would be far less expensive for them (it costs them banking fees, but the money they will raise should more than make up for that) while maintaining their employees' trust.
Re:Lets hope that the result is progress
on
Google v. Microsoft
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The problem with the pure-market philosophy, is that it requires good knowledge of products and services to work
Actually this is completely false. Free markets do not require perfect knowledge or knowledge distribution. Capitalism is based on the "follow don't lead" philosophy. You don't need everything to know what's the optimal choice, just as long as somebody knows just enough and others can follow.
There were several reasons why MSIE killed Netscape. The biggest was that it was free when Netscape was originally not. As soon as they forced Netscape into giving away Navigator, they killed Netscape's revenue and thus R&D money. Another reason was the integration of IE into Windows. Most of the dll's needed by MSIE are loaded at startup. The issue that Netscape used succesfully against MS in court was that MS pressured PC makers to not include Navigator, whereas MSIE was of course included and labeled as "The Internet."
Slashdot Mirror
For the 1.0E9th time...
Giving away a browser and a media player is not the problem. It is using monopoly power to promote your product over the opposition. MS has a monopoly with Windows. I don't think anyone will argue this and none of the regulatory bodies have tried to take action against this. However, they have made it a practice to tie other products such as Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player to Windows. That is illegal all by itself, but MS goes further. They use their position to promote proprietary file formats only supported by their products. Take a look at what they did with Java, or with all the IE-specific DHTMLs and JavaScript variants. For the media player, it is even more obvious with their streaming file format.
[As a side note, one of my favorite examples of how using one MS product can force you into using another is MS Exchange. Obviously you have to use Outlook as a client for this (this is not too bad). Exchange can also be a web mail server allowing access through a browser. However, that browser has to be Internet Explorer -- at least if you want to be able to hit the "reply" button on a message. For that matter, try accessing the Windows Update web page without using IE...]
The best part of it all is that MS is quick to admit that they plan to continue these kind of actions. In a month or so they will release an "update" for Windows that includes a firewall product that is strikingly similar to Zone Alarm and anti-virus software that is very similar to Norton Anti-Virus. Does anyone think that their virus definitions will be compatible with other anti-virus software? Does anyone think that their new firewall will allow users to run Zone Alarm at the same time?
You are probably right that graduating from U of XYZ vs. graduating from ABC State won't influence one's starting salaries. However, there are several prestigous colleges out there that, right or wrong, will have exactly that effect. It's not that a given manager has found that people from Prestigous College are better programmers in their experience, it is the perceived greater compettition for these graduates and the greater confidence in the colleges that produced them. I'm not sure that Ivy League schools have the greatest such effect in technical fields, but certainly the nation's two great science schools, Caltech and M.I.T. have that effect. As someone who has done his share of hiring, I would also say that Stanford and Georgia Tech fall into that category, as well as schools like Duke, Harvey Mudd, and Carnegie Mellon.
It's very interesting to think about who these Niagara based servers are going to be targeted for. The nifty IOE feature and integrated ethernet controller seems to guarantee they should be great for telecom purposes. Of course that's a cursed market that Sun is already king of. Niagara based server seem destined to go head-to-head with dual-processor Xeons and Opterons. IT groups building web server farms or clustered databases will have a new option to consider. Either go with cheaper, lower performance Xeons and Opterons running Linux or with fewer, but more expensive Sun Niagaras running Solaris. It's an interesting proposition, and seems like Sun's first real attempt to compete on price/performance. The real x-factor is AMD. If they can really break into the server market, then the Opteron could offer as much performance as the Niagara but at the same (or lower) price as a Xeon.
It's ironic to see how positions have changed. Intel and AMD are developing multi-core CPUs for use in 4+ way systems, while Sun develops a CPU that is SMP incompatible. Of course Sun is also working on Rock, and hoping it can compete with a Xeon as a single cpu, while still scaling for 100 CPU Infernos (or whatever they are going to call them.)
Windows XP development must have been like going to the grocery store hungry with dad's credit card. There must have been such joy that they were eliminating a crappy codebase (Win 95/98/ME) that all kinds of junk got thrown in. It's all the junk that has made XP even more of security disgrace than the 95 codebase. Granted it also inherited problems from Win 2K, but if they hadn't opened up extra ports or gone for "even more" os/app integration, then they wouldn't have looked so bad. Add in bad ideas from the browser wars (all those IE/Outlook Express vulnerabilities) and you get a big mess.
That being said, Microsoft could take a look at other OSes to see how they regularly improve themselves. Linux and OS X have both had major releases in the last year that significantly improved overall performance on both new and (at least in OS X) older machines. Linux has improved its thread model and scheduler. OS X has decreased its memory footprint, used Open GL to offload UI processing, and improved the threading behind the Finder. Both OSes have improved their ability to interact with other OSes. Apple has also added innovations like Expose and Rendezvous.
Workstations have not been Sun's core business for about ten years now. Intel based machines were already cutting into that market by the mid 90's (look at what happened to SGI at that time.) They switched to servers, particularly high end ones, and made loads more money. Faster and even cheaper Intel processors, Linux, and clustering plus the IT recession are killing this market, too.
The workstation market is a niche market with high margins, well suited to Apple. It is not a very significant market, though. Sun gave up on it a long time ago.
RTFA! Schwartz wants Sun to become a software company and thus make money off software, not hardware. Thus he wants to sell his software on commodity hardware running a free OS, but a not-quite free office suite (Star Office.)
Somebody sure likes using bold.
Also, you're ignorance of Java is amusing.
How the fuck did this get modded to +5?
You talk about people who don't know shit about databases, but you know so much that you had to post anonymously. You clearly don't know shit about MySQL.
You're right that MySQL doesn't have all the features that Oracle and DB2 have, but those two databases don't have all the features that MySQL has. MySQL let's you tailor your databases/table types to what they are going to be used for. You can pick and even change on the fly the algorithm used for your tables. This let's you optimize tables that are read only or non-transactional for speed. Run your tables as MyISAM or HEAP if you have enough RAM, and the speed will blow away Oracle or IBM. If you need transactionality, then go with InnoDB tables.
You also show your ignorance by putting Microsoft in the same sentence as Oracle. If you were building a true enterprise system, MS would not even enter the equation. DB2 would be the only other option to consider besides Oracle. You bitch about MySQL and "Each point release massively changes features." Look at MS. Why do you think they are slipping so badly on the next release of SQL Server? Just take a look at their list of new features they are promising and then talk about "massive changes." This is also not surprising since this will be the first release where they've really added anything over what they got from Sybase.
Not for Xeon and Xeon MPs. Xeons are still limited at 533 MHz.
Yeah it's so easy to win lawsuits, but Injured malpractice plaintiffs win before juries in only 23% of cases, and only 1.1% of medical malpractice plaintiffs who prevail at trial are awarded punitive damages.
This is what rich doctors would have you believe, when actually it's their anti-compettive practices that have driven prices up. They keep the number of doctors artificially low, so as to keep demand high. They also use licensure to force people to purchase mundane services from them instead of having the choice of cheaper alternatives. For example, you have to pay a dentist to clean your teeth, even if they don't do the cleaning themselves, their nurse does it. You talk about OBs, well if you've ever had a baby you would know that the doctor is usually only present for a couple of minutes, the nurses do everything. Guess who gets the bulk of the pay though...
This why good search engines from Yahoo and (hopefully) MSN are important. Google has a Microsoft like stranglehold on searches. So if you want to fool people, you only have to figure out Google. It's a search monoculture, and as such it will be exploited just like an open port on Windows. If there are competing search engines using significantly different algorithms, then it's a lot more difficult to spoof all these engine and search results on all three, including Google, will improve.
The debt was issued in 1994 and was paying interest at 6.5%.
Get real. Nobody pirates software (or other media for that matter) because they are trying to make a statement against company/group XYZ -- they do it because they are greedy. Anything else is an absolute lie, it's somebody with a guilty conscience trying to justify their criminal activity. Try to feel noble. You can claim that you're sticking it to Microsoft, but you know that's not the truth.
I wish I could give an x86 notebook to G4 Powerbook comparison, but I have never owned a Powerbook. I have owned several x86 machines, an iBook and a couple of PowerMacs, including my current 1.8 GHz G5 that I have had since October. I have been a Java developer since the late 90's, so maybe some of my experiences will be useful.
In 2000-2001, I had three machines I did most of my work on. My work machine was a Dell desktop (P3/933, 256 MB, 7200 RPM 30 GB drive, Win2K.) My home machine was a desktop I built myself (P4/1.7, 256 MB, 2x7200 RPM 20 GB drives, Win2K upgraded to XP, plus Red Hat 7.x) Finally, I also had (still have!) an iBook (G3 500 MHz, 256 MB RAM, 10 GB drive, always current OSX.) At the time, the application I was working had a lot of very simple Java code (~1600 classes) and a lot of JSPs. My work machine (P3) was faster than my home machine (P4), which was very disappointing, and my iBook was not even close to being able to keep up with either. Eventually I had a big upgrade on my home machine to a 2.4B chip with supporting mobo and 512 MB of DDR RAM. It then easily smoked the old machines.
From 2002-present I've had three other machines that I've done a lot of work on, plus my upgraded home machine. I have an x86 laptop (P4 1.7, 256 MB RAM, 5400 RPM 30 GB drive, Win XP Pro), a new workstation at work (Xeon 1.8 with HyperThreading, 1 GB of RAM, 7200 RPM 80 GB hard drive, Win XP Pro), and a G5 (1.8 GHZ, 512 MB DDR RAM, 160 GB drive, OS 10.3) at home. The app I worked on most of last year was medium size (~400 classes) but much more complex code. I found that it was slower to compile than the old app (I've run both on my upgraded home machine.) I would give my home machine still a slight edge over my Xeon workstation, though it is close. What's interesting, is that I've also compiled things on a P2 400 running Red Hat 9, and while it is slower, it's not by as much as one might expect. I've also used a co-workers laptop that had an AMD XP 2000 chip in it, and it was much faster than my P4 laptop. In general, AMD chips are better at compiling code, because compilation is so branch heavy.
So what about the G5? Out of the box with JDK 1.4.1, I would say that it was comparable to my home computer and my Xeon workstation. However, on most of my machines I use Jikes, as it is generally a much faster compiler. I compiled my own version of Jikes to run on the G5, with a little bit of 64-bit tweaking. It is easily faster than any of my other machines now. So if there was a G5 laptop out there, I would recommend that. Of course there's not, so I would at least say that for Java dev, go AMD over Intel if you decide to go x86.
I have had just the oppposite experiences. I have a P4 running XP Pro, a G5 and an iBook running Panther. Everything is on a wireless network using a Lynksis wireless router. I had a much easier time getting the Macs on the network (XP had issues with using a firewall and the Belkin wireless PCI card I bought for it at the same time.) I have a DeskJet connected to my P4 and I can print to it just fine from both of my Macs. I did have to look this up on Apple's website, because I had to change a setting on my P4. It is very easy to mount shares from my P4 to either Mac, though my P4 does not alwaays "find" the Macs on the first try. I run iTunes on all machines and can stream between them easily.
So maybe I could see you guys having problems with the printer, but that's just because of the default settings on Windows. Maybe it took hours if you didn't go to Apple's support site and search for it there. Panther and Jaguar are both great for dealing with Windows networks, so maybe you were 10.1 or 9.x ?
This is not how it works for me. I have two Macs (a G5 and an iBook) both running Panther and thus iChatAV. One has a camera, the other is a laptop with a built-in microphone but no camera. I can do audio between the two, but cannot do one-way video.
What I am hoping for is that it will allow one-way video, i.e. iChat user has camera, AIM user does not but gets to see video from iChat user anyways. It does not work this way right now for iChat-to-iChat usage, i.e. if only one of two iChat users has a camera, then no video or audio functions are allowed. However, the iChat menus have options for one-way video or audio, which has fostered my hope that this will be available one day.
Why companies give options
If you're a cash-strapped startup company, obviously the deferred compensation of stock options is a great way to pay employees and save on expenses. Hopefully that is self-evident. Options are also a great way to insure loyalty, since they vest over time and it gives your employees a stake in the company's fortunes. They could also have a high future value, i.e. it gets your employee to take a risk on the company. This also mitigates risk for the employer, i.e. if the company does poorly, then the employer is out very little money. All of these things are true for struggling startups or established monopolies.
An important think to remember for Google, is that they were a startup very recently. Thus they paid a lot of people in options (for reasons outlined above.) They are now very succesful, but if they want to retain people who have been there for 4+ years, who were give lots of options over the years, they must heavily compensate them for the perceived opportunity cost of those options. If they don't then they risk losing valuable employees who reason "I'm not wasting another five years here for nothing." They could definitely compensate people with cash, but to issue an IPO would be far less expensive for them (it costs them banking fees, but the money they will raise should more than make up for that) while maintaining their employees' trust.
There were several reasons why MSIE killed Netscape. The biggest was that it was free when Netscape was originally not. As soon as they forced Netscape into giving away Navigator, they killed Netscape's revenue and thus R&D money. Another reason was the integration of IE into Windows. Most of the dll's needed by MSIE are loaded at startup. The issue that Netscape used succesfully against MS in court was that MS pressured PC makers to not include Navigator, whereas MSIE was of course included and labeled as "The Internet."